Chapter 13 #2
I’m a woman who has lost almost everything a person can lose and kept moving through all of it on one stubborn engine, which is that the world is sweet if you let it be, and I have spent thirty years proving that with a spoon of my own honey at the end of every hard day, the one comfort I never had to leave behind because I carried the bees that made it.
It’s the whole of my religion, that taste.
It’s the thing I’ve reached for on every bad night in every strange town.
And the green knows it, because I’ve been telling the bees my whole life and the bees, it turns out, tell the green, and it has reached into me and found the exact sweet small thing that would hurt worst to lose and hurt least to live without, and it has named that as the price of a handful of children not walking into the dark.
There’s no choice in it. There was never going to be.
“Done,” I say. “Take it. The children stay safe till the bloom, all of them, no wandering, no cold, and you take the taste, and we’re square on this one thing.”
Done, the Keeper says, and there’s a grief in it now that’s for me.
Brave, and foolish, and the two wear one face.
I am sorry, small one. Someone taught you that the world was sweet, and today you kept a dozen children safe by giving that teaching back.
It was well spent. It will not feel well spent tonight.
She lays it on me gentle. I’ll give her that.
It doesn’t hurt, the taking. There’s no pain in it at all, which is somehow worse.
There’s just a small warm going-out, low behind my tongue, a lamp carried out of a room I didn’t know had a lamp in it until it was dark.
And then it’s done, and the meadow’s ordinary, and the Keeper’s gone back into the trees, and a dozen children I’ll never meet will sleep safe in their beds tonight and every night till the bloom, and I’ve paid for it, and it’s paid.
I don’t feel it till I get home.
Madoc’s got supper on, because of course he has, bread that isn’t stale and a pot of something and a comb of my own honey set out on a saucer, because he’s watched me a hundred times end a hard day with a spoon of it and he’s a man who remembers what a person reaches for.
He sets it in front of me without a word, love disguised as a saucer, the same quiet he gives every plank he ever trued.
I take a spoonful. It’s habit. It’s thirty years of habit.
It’s nothing. It’s texture and no taste. It’s the ghost of a thing I’ve loved my whole life, wax and thickness and a memory of gold, and under it, where the sweet should be, where the sweet has always been, there’s a small clean silence.
I set the spoon down very carefully so my hand won’t shake, and I look up, and Madoc’s watching me with the whole of his attention, and he knows.
Of course he knows. He reads me like weather.
He’s watched me eat that spoon every hard night I’ve been under his roof and he sees, in one breath, that the thing I reach for isn’t reaching back.
“What did it cost,” he says. Very quiet. Very level. The most dangerous his voice has ever been.
“The children are safe,” I tell him. “All of them. Till the bloom. No more cold at the treeline. I bought it fair, from the sad one, not the cold one, and it’s done and it can’t be undone, so don’t.”
“What. Did it. Cost.”
I look at the saucer. The lovely useless gold of it.
“The taste of sweet,” I say. “That’s all.
I’ll keep the bees. I just won’t ever taste the honey again.
” I try to smile and it comes out wrong.
“It’s a small thing, Madoc. It’s the smallest thing.
It’s a dozen children against one spoonful.
It’s the best trade I’ve ever made in my life and I’d make it again this second. ”
He doesn’t say it’s a small thing. He never hands me the lie.
He gets up from his side of the table and he comes round to mine and he goes down on one knee beside my chair so he’s below me for once, looking up, and he takes the saucer out of my hands and sets it aside, and he takes both my hands in his enormous scarred ones, and his face has come apart in a way I’ve never seen it, the grumpiest man in three valleys, undone.
“It is not a small thing,” he says, rough.
“It is the exact opposite of a small thing, and I will not have you call it small to make it easier for me, because I’d rather carry the true size of it than let you shrink yourself to spare me.
You gave away the one sweet thing you kept for yourself out of a whole hard life, for a dozen children you’ll never meet, and you did it alone in a field so I couldn’t stop you or share it, and it’s the bravest and the most foolish thing I’ve ever seen a person do, and I am so angry at you, and I have never in my life been so sure of a single thing as I am, right now, on my knee in my own kitchen, that I am never letting you drive over that bridge, not for a heather bloom, not for a whole coast full of orders, not ever. ”
“Madoc—”
“I know it’s not my choice.” His grip tightens.
“I know you’ll go if you decide to go and I’d not stop you, I couldn’t, I’d not want a you that could be stopped.
But you asked the fear-voice this morning whether you were as wanted as the wanting made you feel.
” He looks up at me, wrecked and certain.
“You are more. You are so far past more that I don’t have the word for it, and I build things for a living, I’ve got a word for everything, and I don’t have one for you.
Whatever the binding wants said out loud, I’ve been saying it in saucers and carts and cold iron for three weeks, and I’ll say it in the real words the second you can bear to hear them without bolting, and it’ll be true when I say it, because it’s true now, it’s been true since the goose. ”
I can’t taste the honey. I’ll never taste it again.
But I’m looking down at a man on his knee in a lamplit kitchen telling me I’m more than the wanting, and there’s a thing rising up under my breastbone that’s sweeter than any honey I’ve ever eaten, and it turns out the green couldn’t take that one.
It didn’t even know to look for it. I didn’t have it to lose until three weeks ago in a broken-down wagon in a woodwright’s yard.
“Ask me again after the bloom,” I whisper.
“If we’re both still here. Ask me the real words after the bloom and I’ll say them back and I’ll mean them, I swear it on the bees.
I just, I can’t say a forever three days before a god might take me.
I can’t lose the sweetness and the forever in the same week, Madoc, I’m not that brave.
I’m brave enough for the children and that’s all I’ve got today. ”
“After the bloom,” he agrees, and he presses his forehead to our joined hands, careful of the tusk even now, always, and holds it there.
“After the bloom. We’ve a working to build first anyway.
And a god to answer.” He looks up, and there’s the grim architecture back in his face, the builder, the man with a job.
“You’ve bought the children. Now we finish the anchor, and we learn your song, and in three days we find out whether a beekeeper and a joiner and one true thing said out loud can hold a valley. ”
“That’s a terrible plan.”
“It’s the only one we’ve got.”
“Those are my two favorite kinds of plan.” I turn my hand in his and hold on. “All right, old man. Let’s go build the impossible thing. But you’re feeding me first, and you’re eating too, and neither of us is being brave again until morning.”
He feeds me. I don’t taste the honey. I taste everything else, though, the bread and the pot and the ordinary salt of a meal made by someone who wanted me fed, and it turns out that’s most of what a meal ever was anyway, and I get through the evening, and I don’t cry about the sweetness till he’s asleep, and even then not much, because a dozen children are sleeping safe tonight, and I did that, and I stayed to be sad about it in a bed I’m not driving away from, and for a woman like me that’s very nearly a whole religion all by itself.